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The HTTPArchive has been tracking Page weight (and many other stats) for thousands of websites for a few years now:

As any website performance optimizer will tell you, increasing broadband bandwidth won't really help at all with this "inflation". The biggest components of page speed is usually the number of round trip times, which only reducing latency can help with.

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Interesting site - but it looks like it has only been around since 2010.

http://httparchive.org/trends.php?s=All&minlabel=Nov+15+...

Small amount of time relatively speaking (the Guardian example was from 96 through 2011). So the general trend for a bunch of sites (on httparchive.org) looks more-or-less linear, but that's probably because only a limited amount of time (2 years) is in view.

> The biggest components of page speed is usually the number of round trip times, which only reducing latency can help with.

You can also reduce the number of round trip times by using something like SPDY.

True. Only latency can reduce a single round trip time but reducing the number of serial requests also helps. In addition to SPDY, concatenating or inlining scripts / image sprites and upping the number of parallel connections helps.

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